Hello, numerous times now I have run into issues with automatic alignment, especially in Cyrillic.
The problem:
Especially in Cyrillic, there are a lot of glyphs that are composites that extend the glyph horizontally. The most prominent example would be all the descender glyphs: A base glyph (for example, ka-cy) is combined with descender-cy. The problem is that if you use automatic alignment for all involved components, the base component ka-cy dictates the LSB and RSB, which results in too tight RSB to allow for the descender sticking out:
The feature request:
Set automatic alignment just for one side, or something similar to what happens when you use #entry and #exit anchors. Using those anchors for these kinds of composites doesn’t work, so it would be a very useful addition to be able to set a similar form of automatic alignment even when using different anchors.
Does this make sense, or is my workflow flawed? Thanks!
There is a hack that I added for exactly this purpose. If you add two underscores to the start of the name of the glyph that is used for the hook (e.g. __hook-cy), the width of that glyph will be added to the automatic aligned composite. So it uses the general spacing of the base glyph and adds a few units to it.
Wow! Very cool. I’m afraid this doesn’t quite solve the problem I have: I still want to have manual control over the RSB. The spacing difference of the RSB will not be the same for kadescender-cy and endescender-cy, for example.
Furthermore, this would mean a manual spacing of the __hook-cy component, which I want to avoid as much as possible (I set them to =40 for both sides, always, to prevent unwanted alignment shifts).
Sorry to hijack this thread, but on the topic of auto alignments, is there a way to manually set vertical but not horizontal auto alignment? So the glyphs keep their auto sidebearings, but can be shifted up and down?
But from what I understand, this is no different than using the hack you explained.
I use HT Letterspacer as much as possible, using incremental metrics keys/calculations is definitely not something I find useful or reliable from a design perspective. I only use metrics keys if the shapes are identical (or scaled proportionally, for small figures, for example).
There is a big difference. The hack just adds the width of the “__” component. The metrics keys adds some space to the glyphs that contains the components. So you add the metrics keys ot the “kadescender-cy”.
Maybe I wasn’t clear. I don’t want to automatically set the RSB, I want to be able to manually control it, so like it currently is if I disable the automatic alignment of the first component.
What I want to do is automatically align the first component for automatic LSB, but still have control over its RSB.